State Arts Leaders Gear Up for the ‘90s : Funding: The California Confederation of the Arts stresses planning, cultural equality and the competition for fewer arts dollars.

Artists and arts organizations must prove that their work strongly benefits the majority of Californians if they are to survive drastic budget cuts looming over the state government, concluded a weekend panel on “The New Governor and the Arts,” part of a four-day meeting of statewide arts leaders that ended at the Biltmore Hotel Saturday.

“The fact is that this community has still not done what’s required of it to compete for an allocation of resources under siege,” said state assemblyman and panelist Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles), speaking during the annual convention of the California Confederation of the Arts, the state’s largest arts-advocacy organization.

“You’ve got to face the harsh realities--you need proof and evidence to show that your programs are actually benefiting the lion’s share of the people in California. You need to show that there is bang for your buck, and I don’t think that any programs are going to survive that can’t do that.

“This budget is going to get down to a war . . . and you’re just another line item, when people are looking for line items to cut,” continued Roos.

Said panel member Joanne C. Kozberg, chairwoman of the California Arts Council, which allocates the state arts budget: “We need to show that the arts are important to the economic vitality of the state. We need to tie into the social issues; to show that our work (deals with) issues like AIDS and homelessness.”

Panelist Paul Minicucci, senior consultant for the Joint Legislative Committee on the Arts, also said that the arts should try to obtain state funding earmarked for social services.

“We need not get in the bind of money for arts versus money for social services,” said Minicucci, referring to the notion that the arts are less important than social services, and thus should be cut in times of financial hardship. “We are connected to other kinds of constituencies and services, from education to mental health. . . . Money’s already going to be spent in the prisons, for instance, so we need to energize those systems. Whatever money is already being spent there, we should utilize.”

One of the key business aspects of the annual CCA convention was the meeting of seven arts caucuses, split into such categories as independent artists, major institutions and presenters. Each caucus expressed concerns over arts funding. But while few concrete goals came out of the early caucus meetings, the Multicultural Caucus, chaired by new Confederation board member Fe Bongolan, reached a “strong consensus” to denounce current state plans for the 1992 Quincentennial Celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, which Bongolan said “denied history” and “denigrates cultures and people of color.”

According to Bongolan, the confederation will now draft a resolution to be forwarded to the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on the Arts asking that rather than focus on Columbus’ exploration, the quincentennial should “redirect its energy toward native people of the state and acknowledge communities of color in the state.”

A Friday afternoon panel on “International and Multicultural Festivals: What Works and What Doesn’t?” featured representatives of September’s Los Angeles Festival and San Francisco’s ill-fated Festival 2000, which filed for bankruptcy Nov. 9.

The importance of early marketing and fund-raising efforts--problems, to different degrees, for both festivals--was stressed by L.A. Festival executive director Judith Luther and Open Festival coordinator Aaron Paley, as well as Anne W. Smith, a festival and special event consultant to the San Francisco Arts Commission and a city facilitator for Festival 2000.

“We need to discover some of the things that only commercially driven festivals have discovered,” said Smith, who noted that a complete evaluation of Festival 2000 is expected by the end of January. “It’s important to seek out known supporters with dollars and influence; and don’t expect to break even with a multivenue, multiperformance festival.”

As for the Los Angeles Festival, which Luther said is “still receiving funding (and) paying bills” and has yet to come up with an accounting tally, both Luther and Paley said that in hindsight, it was too “artist-driven” to achieve financial success.

“One of our major problems was letting people know (about the festival). Advance marketing turned out to be much more important than we expected it would be,” said Luther. One of the festival’s best but underused marketing ploys, she said, was taking ads in small ethnic newspapers. “We backed into marketing and we really didn’t make it the priority it should have been.”

Said Paley, who coordinated the non-curated programs connected to the L.A. Festival: “We need to spend more time thinking about the audience. We spent all year finding the artists, but we need to spend all year finding an audience as well. We also spent more time putting a community-based board (of directors) together than we did putting a true, get-money board together.”

As for future L.A. Festivals (the next one is planned for 1993), Luther predicted that “funding will be increasingly hard” because of the declining economy, but dismissed the notion that Festival 2000’s financial problems would prompt fear of the same thing happening in Los Angeles.

“If we break even on this--and I think we’ll just squeak by--then I think that donors will not get things mixed up; they’ll see that each festival is different and they will continue to fund us.”

Other highlights of the convention included general sessions on cultural equity and freedom of expression; a keynote address about the state of the arts in the Soviet Union by Soviet rock music producer Artemy Troitsky; the annual Leonardo da Vinci Awards banquet, which honored arts patrons Caroline Ahmanson and AT&T; a mini-conference on arts and disabilities; and a panel discussion on the arts and international tourism.

Attendance at this year’s confederation convention was lower than in the past, with only about 200 to 300 fully paid participants, as opposed to the usual 300 to 500, organizers said.